With the recent development of ion mobility based separation technology, ion mobility mass spectrometers (IMS) have come into common use in analytical laboratories. In the past decade, our research has been focusing on the development of high resolution ion mobility devices, and has demonstrated that IMS resolving power is equivalent or better than that of modern HPLC systems. Because of the orthogonality of mobility based separation to HPLC and mass spectrometry (MS), IMS enhances the capability of MS systems for the analysis of complex samples.
Multi-dimensional data from combinations of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) with mass spectrometry (MS) are powerful for analysis of complex mixtures. Drift tube IMS separations requiring 1-100 ms can be conveniently analyzed by repetitions of 1-100 μs time-of-flight (tof) MS pulses, but combination with the 100-1000 ms cycle times of trapping MS seems problematic: trap style mass analyzers obtain mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) information on a slower timescale than typical signal-averaged mobility experiments. Due to the time consuming nature of ion injection events, dual gate ion mobility devices provide an effective means by which mobility-mass experiments can be accomplished. The inclusion of a two gate system selectively filters ions prior to mass analysis, producing a mobility spectrum by reconstructing sequential windows sampled by scanning the time delay in the opening between the first and second gates. However, this process can be rather lengthy.